more popular? i have no idea, just can speak for myself,using bitcoins now for about 1.5years to buy stuff, sell stuff, make donations, i NEVER used silkroad and my guess is, that this is true for the majority of bitcoin users.i'd say i'm very familiar with bitcoin, but i haven't even seen the silkroad website, i only heard and read about it in the news.

it's so so easy to point at silkroad to say "see? it's only used for illegal stuff"

Honestly, the largest use is probably still as an investment vehicle through the exchanges and the various funds here in the marketplace forum (bitpyramid, etc). There still aren't that many vendors bit it's getting better!

I got 99 problems but a bit ain't one1JCk7WHmdmSTQaaRPHGDVuYTB5o1XRENav

I've been actively using Bitcoin for about a year now, know about Silk Road (I tend to check it now and again to keep myself up to date), but it never appeared to me as being used by very many people. Granted though, it gained immense popularity after the "bad press" it caused, so I'm guessing it has a lot of active users nowadays.

Like others, I also guess Bitcoin is currently mostly being used for shuffling money between exchanges, investment vehicles, betting sites, etc. Uninteresting stuff. I don't think any of these is the majority use case though.

Looking at my wallet history, admittedly almost half the transactions are between me and pools/exchanges. The other half though, is pretty random. A few hundred coins for electronic equipment, another few hundred for services. A few transactions to/from friends. An unhealthy amount of donations. Very random purchases from the forum and auction sites.

Bitcoins can avoid high fees for international purchases as well as a degree of anonymity(if used properly) not afforded by credit cards. as such this makes them useful for unsavory or just embarasing purchases in addition to regular purchases of things such food, computer hardware, kitchen equipment and just about anything else

I'm not that into BitCoins yet but I read a lot about it.What I would want to use it for is as a payment method for my web shop, but for that I need to learn how to make it anonymous for my buyers and myself.

Don't want random people to be able to track how much I sell and/or to who I sell it.